The New Anti-Pornographers

Some days the double entendres just write themselves. Such as when the Utah legislature and Gov. Gary “Pervert” Herbert declare that pornography is a public health hazard and promise to take a long, hard, penetrating look at the threat pornography poses to society, get to the bottom of what’s causing the problem and lick it so it never rears its head in Utah again.

The nonbinding resolution calls for research, education and policy changes “to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the citizens of Utah and the nation.”

You will be shocked to learn the nonBDSMbinding resolution is full of the same lies about porn that the panty police have been flogging since about 10 seconds after someone drew an picture of man with a boner on a cave wall in Lascaux. (The fucking French and their accidental penisings go back a long way.)

“The resolution makes way for a multifaceted approach to solving this crisis, said Pamela Atkinson, the chair of the Utah Coalition Against Pornography board.

“She said the state is worried about 82 percent of sex offenders who started off by viewing pornography.

And I bet 90% of them were right handed! I believe the logical fallacy is known as cherry-picking?

Or maybe it’s the one known as lying through one’s teeth.

“‘They acknowledged they got involved with simple — or soft core porn — years ago,’ she said. ‘It’s not so satisfying anymore and that’s when they move on to the hard core porn. When that is not satisfying any more, they act out on real human beings. They objectify children and young women.'”

Yes that’s right. A group of people said they once saw a softly-lit tit framed by a feather boa … and She Who Rummages under Mattresses & Through Your Search History still has to imply that they said they started raping kids as a result.

Possibly because Atkinson is aware that insisting there’s a link will cause someone to whip out one of the many studies that shows there’s no correlation between the availability of porn and sexual assault.

It’s a delicate line for the Families Against Porn crowd to tread. They want women and (I assume) men who have children, to be good and scared or this shit absolutely will not work.

At the same time, if one runs around shrieking that every man who looks at film of two adults playing hide the gherkin will turn into a drooling rapist, every normal man who has looked at the gherkin video will get pissed off. The rapists, however, will appreciate yet another excuse for their behavior. Debbie Does Dallas made them do it!

The Utah Commission for Upholding Morals does acknowledge that women look at porn, but for some mysterious reason that eludes me at the moment, women aren’t expected to start assaulting anything that moves. Instead they become passive sex toys for the porn-crazed men.

Got it! The reason is the entire point of this exercise is to reinforce the patriarchal attitudes that do pose a risk to women and children. And probably make a few bucks while looking at dirty books and videos. (As an aside, this is one of the many reasons I’ve never gotten the willingness of some radical feminists to join forces with the neo-cons to fight porn. However, there’s a slight chance they’ll all wind up locked in the same room together and someone will lose the key, so I don’t object. I just don’t get it.)

Legions of men shuffling around with their pants around their ankles as they moan “Boooooobs” aren’t the only thing Utah is worried about. Porn also makes the young fellas not want to get married, and when they do get married, they aren’t happy.

WHEREAS, pornography use is linked to lessening desire in young men to marry, dissatisfaction in marriage, and infidelity;

The weight bearing capacity of “is linked to” is impressive, but it is starting to show some hairline cracks.

And I can see why young men not wanting to get married is a concern in a state with the youngest average age for newlyweds. Why, they might start waiting until they’re the hoary age of 28 and then women might start waiting until they’re 26. And the next thing you know absolutely nothing bad has happened and the Committee to Re-examine Explicit Animated Media & Pornography Investigation Executive will have to find something else to do.

Merci to Trumpeter against Trump efgoldman for the heads up.

The following video contains naughty words, don’t click at work, in front of small children or in the state of Utah.

I will reluctantly volunteer to be a full-time pornography researcher. All I will require is a very large supply of tissues ….. you know, to dry all the tears I will shed after seeing so many horrible things.

One of my wife’s old boyfriends was a porn video editor for a while. He started to kinda loathe it after a fairly short period of time.

postmodulator

I dipped a toe in doing some web stuff for adult entertainment — gosh, must be fifteen years ago now. The consensus of people I knew who did it seriously was that after a while the sight of a naked woman basically did nothing for you.

I decided I never wanted that to be true for me.

efgoldman

The consensus of people I knew who did it seriously was that after a while the sight of a naked woman basically did nothing for you.

Yeah. It’s like all the candy factories that used to be around Boston. They told new employees “take as much as you want.” After a few days, people couldn’t stand the taste.

galanx

Funny, that never seemed to work down at the brewery.

Origami Isopod

I have a friend who was a webmaster for porn sites some years back. He didn’t quite come to loathe it but he found it a lot less impressive or appealing before long.

libarbarian

And I bet 90% of them were right handed! I believe the logical fallacy is known as cherry-picking?

It’s not “cherry-picking” to point out that 100% of the people who watch pornography end up dying. It can’t be “cherry picking” when it applies to literally every single one of them.

rea

post hoc ergo propter hoc

delazeur

Please excuse me while I go watch some West Wing.

Warren Terra

Every single one of them masticated and perambulated prior to starting their life of crime!

Not only that—for every porn niche, there’s plenty of people prepared to scratch it!

ThrottleJockey

I’m not sure what to think. Lots of liberals and feminist negatively critique porn. So I suppose I should buy a subscription to Playboy? (Oh wait they don’t feature nudity anymore).

I’m old enough to remember when the Meese Commission tried to prove a non-existent link between rape and porn and yet these things that Utah sites below resonate with me:

The resolution identifies a number of “individual and public health impacts and societal harms” it attributes to pornography, including:

Low self-esteem and body image in adolescents, who, according to the resolution, are exposed to porn at an average age of 11-12

The hypersexualization of teens “and even prepubescent children”

The normalization of violence, abuse and rape

The objectification of women, which “teaches girls they are to be used and teaches boys to be users”

Feminists frequently complain about many of these very same things. That’s why this strikes me as nothing but a reflexive attack on conservatives.

alex284

Well, let’s see:

a) those feminists were a small minority of feminists several decades ago, nowhere near a majority of feminists in 2016

b) shakezula actually mentioned those feminists and called them out, which you would know if you bothered to read the op

c) this school of thought was never liberal anyway, it was a part of radical feminism

d) even if the above weren’t true, it doesn’t mean that porn actually leads to any of those negative consequences because the truth isn’t defined as “what a fraction of people on the right and the left believe”

If anything, I take your comment as a reflexive attack on liberals. “A liberal said something! It must be wrong! I won’t say why!”

And, yet the point stands. How nice to see a black woman defend black women being degraded.

DrS

It took quite a hit on my young nieces self-esteem.

Won’t someone think of the children.

ThrottleJockey

A) how old do you think I am??? I’m not talking about Gloria Steinem and Ms I’m talking about Jessica Valenti and Feministing.

It is not a secret that many feminists have pointed out the “woman problem” within the porn industry. The images depicted in mainstream porn have become more and more hostile towards women. When you examine the role of women of color in the porn industry, it gets worse with some of the most problematic racial stereotypes being marketed front and center. These are legitimate concerns. As is the less complex argument that porn is bad for women because it exists to satisfy a male gaze, I guess.

sharculese

Those aren’t arguments that porn qua porn is bad, they’re arguments that porn as it exists in America could make be improved a fucking ton.

ThrottleJockey

I thought the comments in the messed up link I provided for interesting here’s one below (corrected link here):

I think feminist porn is real possibility, but I’ve never seen any. I think if you could find men and women who were in pornography because they want to be, not because of some childhood sexual trauma or coercion, or whatever other negative motivation there could be, and those people respected one another mutually … sure. I just have a hard time believing that the situation exists.

In many ways mainstream porn epitomizes the height of sexism.

ringtail

This is similar to the argument made I think, by Noam Chomsky that the real problem with porn is income inequality. Basically, if our society treated women fully like people, it would be reflected in who and how does the porn. Since we basically objectify and systematically disempower women we wind up with porn that exploits women.

ThrottleJockey

And by the way feministing is hardly “radical”. A link to it is featured on the right hand side of the lgm site.

c) this school of thought was never liberal anyway, it was a part of radical feminism

Well, that’s not right. There are plenty of liberal feminists who critique the existent porn industry and liberal feminist who find pornography regulation to involve a tension of values (e.g., free speech vs. anti-objectification).

And the traditions are complex. Some liberalism strains of feminism go back to suffragettes by way of prohibitionists.

And like with prostitution, harm based analyses may have started in radical feminism, but they percolated pretty far out. And, I think, are generally quite good. Getting the harm picture right is very hard and subject to bias and designing remedies even harder. But I think they genuinely get at something fundamentally right and were big advances in our conceptualisation of these issues.

Always interesting to see a liberal defend the positive contributions of Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Bob Guccione.

TribalistMeathead

In an enemy-of-my-enemy-of-my-enemy-of-my-enemy sort of way, I’d consider securing the Constitutional right to mock televangelists a positive contribution.

AttorneyAtPaw

I, too, remember my first time with Campari.

The Dark Avenger

You had to read OMNi stoned, man. I’m sorry you didn’t get the memo.

AttorneyAtPaw

What’s always bothered me about this whole line of argument is the almost complete lack of agency it imputes to adult human beings. I mean, sure, we’re not Towers of Willpower completely unmodifiable by our environments. But the way the censorship crowd invariably takes “possible small correlation” and turns it into “absolute, inevitable causality” bespeaks a very patronizing view of their fellow citizens.

More worrisome is that this may not even be an attempt at empirical accounting on the censors’ part so much as a reflection of their authoritarian fantasy. “Monkey see, monkey do” sounds pretty great to people who view their role as Zookeeper.

BigHank53

I’m not sure what to think.

Well, don’t let that slow you down.

Brett

1. Adolescents have low self-esteem for a range of reasons, and I doubt porn is a major source.

3. Very much not the case anymore, at least in my experience with what you see on places like Pornhub. There’s kink stuff that simulates some of it, but it’s very obvious that it’s staged kink. This was probably more common back when porn was only distributed by video and DVD.

4. I don’t know about that, but the vast majority of porn definitely does focus on an implied straight guy viewer. Just compare male POV porn vs female POV porn – the latter stuff is much more thin on the ground.

If you really wanted to make a criticism of porn that hits, it’s that in the absence of widespread comprehensive sex education, porn’s playing a disproportionate role in shaping young folks’ views on how sex should be performed. That’s not something the Utah folks passing this resolution have any intention of addressing, either – sex education is patchy at best here, and even the best of it doesn’t actually help you on having good sex aside from avoiding STDs and using contraception.

DrS

If you really wanted to make a criticism of porn that hits, it’s that in the absence of widespread comprehensive sex education, porn’s playing a disproportionate role in shaping young folks’ views on how sex should be performed.

OMG, this. I wish I had the source, but it was in some article on relationships and dating and one woman’s critique of a date was ‘trained by porn’, cause I’m sure that’s what he’s seen and he’d probably barely done anything.

Speaking purely on a functional level, many of the positions in porn are not great for delivering pleasure, but do provide the camera a good angle for viewing.

Robert M.

OMG this, indeed. I don’t think it’s possible to separate the issues ThrottleJockey and the state of Utah believe are “caused by” porn from the issues caused by a culture that completely abdicates its role in teaching kids what healthy, respectful sexuality looks like.

ThrottleJockey

I’m not so asinine to think that the “relationships” advocated by the pon industry are in any way something progressives should support. Utah really has nothing to do with this. This ain’t rocket science. You Google “Black Cheerleader G***b**ng” and you tell me if that’s something you want to defend. Progressives can’t go around defending stuff just because social conservatives also oppose it, as Shakes has done. Just because we don’t advocate the male-female relationships that Jerry Falwell did, doesn’t mean we have to advocate the male-female relationships that Larry Flynt would.

Robert M.

Utah absolutely does have something to do with this, because this silly commission is endorsing a worldview that says “bad people watch porn, therefore porn makes you a bad person!”

I have zero interest in Googling anything like that–humiliation isn’t my kink. And I’m not interested in defending porn that humiliates women, either. But you’re drawing the same causal link the state of Utah is: it characterizes all porn as awful, sex-negative, and patriarchal, and states without evidence that it causes the awful, sex-negative, patriarchal culture.

The proper picture is a feedback loop, with porn as one result (but by no means the only result, or even the most pervasive or damaging) of the awful, sex-negative, patriarchal culture. Attacking that feedback loop by attacking the link that leads from harmful porn back to harmful culture is (1) very unlikely to be successful, since people like to wank, and (2) even if you could be successful, you’d just have chopped off one head of the hydra.

Instead, let’s attack the link that leads from the culture to porn. Let’s make sure that (1) there’s ethical, consensual porn out there for consumption, (2) do our best to de-stigmatize the consumption of porn, and (3) educate people about the fact that porn is sex made by experienced performers for the sake of performance, and that even good porn isn’t the same as the sex you’re going to have (in the same way that a pickup game of touch football in the backyard isn’t going to look like the Superb Owl).

ThrottleJockey, who frequently claims to be “more liberal than most people on this site”, yet again defends the most reactionary, authoritarian, conservative bullshit he can find.

My mind has no boggles left to give.

Thirtyish

Well, I can help demystify a little: he does not know what the terms “liberal,” “authoritarian,” and “conservative” really mean.

The Dark Avenger

An authoritarian, top-down imposition of conventional sexual morality originally derived for a Bronze-Age tribe of patriarchal Semites.

What’s there not for hIm to like about it?

Origami Isopod

He’s a walking advertisement for not raising your kids Creationist.

ThrottleJockey

Hating people because of their religious beliefs OI is every bit as bad as hating people because they’re gay or lesbian or black or Latino. It’s another -ism, like racism, that reveals it’s purveyors as twisted little people poisoning the environment of those around them.

The Dark Avenger

Wrongs, we hate people who would force their religious beliefs on others, like the anti-abortionists whose fee-fees you’re always defending here.

How about supporting the 1st amendment. I disapprove of what you fap to, but I will defend to the death your right to fap to It

ThrottleJockey

Lol, if it was a 1st Amendment question I’d agree with you. But no one is calling for censoring it. I don’t think it should be banned in the slightest, but let’s not defend it out of some knee jerk reaction to Mormons.

DrS

He’s classifying speech as a threat to public health. Yeah, no 1st amendment issue there, not a one.

Do you even civics, bruh?

Dr. Ronnie James, DO

You’d think the argument “teach them about sex before James Deen does” might resonate, but I think these folks want to pretend kids just think sex is ewwwwww until they hit 18 or something. Puberty typically starts at *10*, y’all.

JMP

This is Utah; they want to pretend kids think sex is gross until they get married – which granted in a place like that might be at 18.

Origami Isopod

which granted in a place like that might be at 18.

If they’re lucky.

Then there’s the FLDS.

Hogan

Old enough to get my attention, old enough to butcher.

DrS

My fave line is “The kids grow up so fast these days”.

Yeah, they do grow up fast, but they always have. Teach them how to deal, not pretend it won’t happen. This notion of protecting their ‘innocence’ that leaves them open to all manner of easily predictable issues and problems is a disaster for all involved.

Origami Isopod

The fetishization of “innocence,” which is properly termed ignorance, is creepy, and not least because it does a lot of harm in enabling teenagers and especially teenage girls to protect themselves.

Here’s an article I found the other day, pointing out how society construes teenage girls as dangerous because, in the straight male gaze, they embody sex.

I very much appreciate how the author points to cutesiness and “girliness” as methods of desexualizing teenage girls. You might ask, “Why shouldn’t we desexualize teenage girls?” Well, because they are sexual creatures, as all humans are, and because if they were given adequate sex education, healthcare, and support against rape culture, they could navigate sex a lot better. Keeping them from navigating it doesn’t work and never has.

(Unfortunately IMO, a lot of young feminists have embraced the whole glitter-hearts-and-everything-pink aesthetic, and you can’t critique it these days without being accused of “femme-phobia.” Yeah, no, there’s a difference between looking traditionally feminine and looking infantilized. You do you, but don’t expect me to gush over it.)

Thirtyish

The fetishization of “innocence,” which is properly termed ignorance, is creepy,

YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. (Did I mention “YES?”).

Not to mention that the whole idea of “innocence”as an aspirational ideal is questionable at best (even for very young children), and at worst, vomit-inducing, diabetic-coma-inspiring, mind-numbingly stupid religious bullshit.

Yeah, no, there’s a difference between looking traditionally feminine and looking infantilized. You do you, but don’t expect me to gush over it.)

Take a bow. You win the thread.

Origami Isopod

Thanks. :) (Let’s see if this threads properly this time.)

To quote what I just told someone in email: I’m so damn tired of “Weaponized!! Femininity!!” out of the mouths of high school and college students who think that if you’re not a Barbie doll stereotype you can’t be cisgender. And so damn tired of being lectured about my “internalized misogyny” because I don’t think nail art makes you Artemisia Gentileschi and I think that the little black dress is worth a thousand lolita getups.

Hogan

Artemisia Gentileschi

I will love you forever.

Ken

Low self-esteem and body image in adolescents

The hypersexualization of teens “and even prepubescent children”

They’re going to have to draw a very careful line between pornography and advertising.

The normalization of violence, abuse and rape

And between pornography and the BYU football team.

The objectification of women, which “teaches girls they are to be used and teaches boys to be users”

And between pornography and the Traditional Family Values crowd – especially the subset that think a girl’s first date should be with her daddy.

ThrottleJockey

I agree with everything you said and I just stress that much of advertising is problematic.

DrDick

The objectification of women, which “teaches girls they are to be used and teaches boys to be users”

I thought that was a central tenet of Mormon dogma?

TribalistMeathead

At least it’s an ethos.

efgoldman

I thought that was a central tenet of Mormon dogma?

Isn’t Utah one of the states that would not only ban abortion, but contraception and women’s reproductive health/freedom in general, if they thought they could get away with it?
Probably not a coincidence. They want to install chastity belts statewide. No wonder the porn consumption is so high.
They also act like the info on clicks and links isn’t widely available.

Bill Murray

well if the Utah conservatives were really serious they would ban TV advertising and many TV shows as they do much more than porn on those four issues

efgoldman

if the Utah conservatives were really serious they would ban TV advertising and many TV shows

I bet all he local cable TV contracts allow HBO, skinemax, and Playboy channel. Lots of nekkid wimmins even without intartoobz porn.

I’m trying to decide how much it matters that those numbers are per broadband user, so don’t reflect the whole population. In particular, you have to be able to afford broadband. In a state with low per-capita GDP and high income inequality, that might be a relatively small fraction.

Or, if you want to spin it that way, you could say that the Mississippi job creators spend their tax cuts on porn.

DAS

Of course. For example, Utah has a very large number of porn fiends. The Utah governor and legislature are very concerned about this as they fear that the large number of porn fiends who happen to live in Utah may very well come to treat women horribly. That is why in places where a lot of porn fiends happen to live, you see the culture reacting to make sure that those hyper-sexual desires of those porn fiends get properly repressed … before they end up treating the women in their lives horribly.

Oh wait a minute. Could I have the causation backwards? Could it be that the repressed culture leads to increased pornography consumption and not the other way around?

I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of porn consumption in red states, but I’m wondering how much of it is consumed by visitors, such as hotel guests watching the porn channels or truckers stopping at those huge adult bookstores in the South. Were those credit-card receipts used to determine the consumer’s home state, or the state in which the porn was consumed?

Southern states having high porn rates is not because New Yorkers and Californians are driving through Alabama and get sudden urges and see a giant porn store.

Origami Isopod

Bit of a strawman there. I’m not saying that red staters don’t consume a lot of porn themselves, just that the stats might not be telling the whole story. Utah supposedly had the highest consumption of porn in the U.S. at one point, but it seemed to be mainly based on records from hotels in Salt Lake City.

Thirtyish

Yep. The talk about porn “objectifying women” is precious in light of the fact that most of these anti-porn authoritarians don’t actually see any problem with objectifying women or treating them like childlike second-class citizens. It reminds me of the double-speak we saw about the North Carolina bathroom bill–handwringing about women getting raped means nothing when the ones wringing their hands don’t normally consider rape to be that big of a deal.

Origami Isopod

The talk about porn “objectifying women” is precious in light of the fact that most of these anti-porn authoritarians don’t actually see any problem with objectifying women or treating them like childlike second-class citizens.

There are similarities with their rhetoric around abortion, which denies that we have any agency or intelligence (when they’re not calling us baby-killing Jezebel whores anyway).

GFW

In a reverse of the usual “I misread that as something dirty”, I read your post as starting “The biggest corn fields I have ever…”

galanx

Me too- is this some kind of murderous rural children fetish? Because corn fields are creepy.

Cheerful

If the problem is men watching violent pornography and becoming violent, the solution obviously is to only outlaw pornography for men, and also for Utah to start sponsoring its own female friendlier pornography thus moving the entire market in a more peaceful direction so it consists in its entirety of fully consenting women having sex while their cats play with pieces of string:

You really should put a NSFW tag on that for idiots like me who are just skimming and click on a cat link.

:)

Cheerful

I agree I should have done a better job of alerting people that this is a tumblr with videos of sex. I just find the film of that cat obliviously batting at the string so hilarious, I kind of lost track of some of the norms of social propriety.

StringOnAStick

Having known a few Mormons in my time, there is quite a bit of haw-hawing about how horny those Mormon boys are, golly gee, scuff the dirt in front of the pick’em up truck. Obviously only boys are allowed to be horny in Mormon culture, the girls are supposed to be chaste and pure, period.

Maybe if they didn’t do things like target the victims of rape at BYU for violating the behavior code for being raped and therefore obviously being a slutty slut, the Mormon girls might grow up with a healthier, and therefore more exploratory and -dare I say it- lusty attitude about sex. This might help keep the married boys down on the farm, so to speak.

But this fall, because of a new Utah law that protects lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from being fired for their sexual orientation or gender identity, Ms. Rice, who over the past four years had transitioned from a man to a woman, felt comfortable going to school as herself for the first time.

I’m only surprised they didn’t do this sooner. Back when I was still non-believing-but-attending-because-family-and-friends, warnings against the temptations and evils of pornography were an annual thing in the men’s Priesthood Conference Sessions.

It’s not like Utah somehow became more Republican since then, either. It’s just been dominated by Republicans at the state level for years, with rare exceptions.

Why, they might start waiting until they’re the hoary age of 28 and then women might start waiting until they’re 26.

In doing so, they impede the righteous Mormon baby-making crusade to conquer the world. If you do not have a half dozen brats before you are 30, you are failing the cause!

LWA

Dear LGM-
I never thought I would be writing to you but I just had to share this.
I saw my first Penthouse when I was a lad of 13, back in 1973.
I have been looking at naked women ever since and for some perverse reason I have never felt a desire to hurt a woman or child.
Am I sick? Is this normal?

Named signed, witheld by request

efgoldman

Some of us are old enough to remember when Deep Throat came out in the early ’70s, and showed in first run mainstream theaters.
Then it followed the usual succession to the drive-ins.
Including the old Neponset Drive in, along what’s now I-93 in Boston.
Visible from the highway.
Some fun.

GeorgeBurnsWasRight

Lots of auto accidents there, I’m betting.

efgoldman

Lots of auto accidents there, I’m betting.

My parents, then in their late 50s, actually went to see it (not at the drive-in).
I never did, until years later.

Bitter Scribe

Doesn’t Utah have one of the highest rates of porn consumption of any state?

It has the highest number of porn subscriptions – people actually paying for porn. Maybe they just somehow don’t know that it’s available for free all over the internet?

Hogan

It’s like cable–basic is free, but you pay for premium.

grouchomarxist

Legions of men shuffling around with their pants around their ankles as they moan “Boooooobs”

I’m seeing this as The Hot Network’s answer to The Walking Dead.

Jordan

Was Mormon, can confirm the weirdo anti-porn fixation. At one point as a high schooler our internet blocked my future university’s philosophy department page (we had a mormon ISP. It was hilariously easy to get around, but still) for some sex related reason (I have no idea what it could have been other than just fairly innocuous keywords).

Heard about a first cousin once removed’s marriage disintegrate. Its pretty clear her husband was a straight asshole. I hope very much it was not because he was violent, but don’t know. The rationale I heard was “he was addicted to porn”.

I’m going to suggest that, just maybe, if “about 82 percent of sex offenders” started by looking at porn it’s because most guys, period, look at at least a certain amount of porn in their lives. (Not sure what the percentage of women would be). I’m actually shocked that the percentage is so low, but it’s till about as meaningful as saying that “about 82 percent of sex offenders” went to high school.

Srsly Dad Y

By the standards of psychological research, if you found that 82% of sex offenders viewed porn while, say, 88% of the general population viewed porn, you might have a statistically significant, publishable result showing that porn is a treatment for future sex offenders.